Current Events in Brief

Case Dismissed

A Chicago teacher has lost her legal battle against a local
television station that aired accusations that she held one of her
students down and instructed his classmates to beat him. ("The Rest Of The Story," August/September.)
A judge for the Circuit Court of Cook County in Illinois dismissed
Rosalyn Snitowsky's suit, arguing that the reporting by WMAQ, Chicago's
NBC affiliate, was based on ongoing investigations by police and the
Chicago board of education and could not be construed as defamatory.
Snitowsky, a veteran special education teacher, had also named her
school's principal, Marjorie Adams, and other Chicago school officials
as defendants in the suit. But the judge ruled that as public
officials, Adams and her colleagues enjoy immunity from civil
liability. Snitowsky's lawyer, Paul Vickrey, said he will appeal the
decision.

Fight For Right

The parents of four Jewish children are charging in a lawsuit that
Alabama's 2,600-student Pike County district violated the children's
right to religious freedom. According to the suit, school officials
made the students remove yarmulkes, required them to bow their heads
during Christian prayers, and failed to stop anti-Semitic taunts. On
one occasion, a high school vice principal disciplined one of the
children by asking him to write an essay about "Why Jesus Loves Me."
The boy refused, the suit says, and the superintendent later wrote to
the parents to assure them such punishment would not be levied again.
The suit, filed by Wayne and Sue Willis and backed by the American
Civil Liberties Union, contends that the children have been denied the
opportunity to practice their faith while the majority of students
freely practice Christianity, often to the point of violating the U.S.
Constitution's prohibition against government establishment of
religion. It seeks an injunction banning unconstitutional practices in
the district but does not ask for monetary damages.

TV Enticement

St. Louis public school students had an extra incentive to show up
for the first day of classes this year. Everyone marked "present"
became eligible to win one of five large-screen televisions in a
sweepstakes drawing to be held later in the year. "The first day is one
of the low-attendance days, and you want to get kids in the school in
the beginning," said superintendent Cleveland Hammonds Jr. One out of
four students in the 45,000-student system skipped the first day last
year; the district loses about $24 daily in state aid for each student
who is absent. Maritz Inc., a Fenton, Missouri-based
performance-improvement company, is running the giveaway. It has
donated more than $3 million in prizes over the past eight years to
encourage attendance in the St. Louis schools.

A Math Problem

School officials in Lancaster, Texas, have suspended a high school
math department head and five teachers without pay for using a
worksheet that framed word problems around minority stereotypes, drugs,
guns, and sex. The worksheets were distributed to more than 100
students at Elsie Robertson High School on the first day of classes.
The problems asked students to calculate percentages involving drug
sales, drive-by shootings, and teenage pregnancies. Superintendent Bill
Ward says the teachers displayed "poor judgment" but declined to
comment further. The department head, suspended for 60 days, and the
five teachers, suspended for 30, account for half the high school's
math department. Scott Martin, the department head, told the Dallas
Morning News that he received the worksheet four or five years ago
at a teacher workshop and has used it before without incident.

Home Sweet School

Some people live for their jobs. Robert Broomfield, superintendent
of the Raymond public schools outside of Lincoln, Nebraska, lives at
his. The district chief parked his trailer on the campus of one of his
schools in August and is now calling it home. "Time and availability is
the major issue," he says. "The school board has wanted someone out
here for years." The rural 1,000-student district has four schools
spread over 200 square miles. Broomfield says his move to the grounds
of Raymond Central Junior-Senior High School will allow him to keep an
eye on things. "I'll stay here as long as I think it's valuable," he
says.

Voice Of Experience

The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation is seeking essays and writing by
senior teachers--those with at least 15 years of classroom
experience--that discuss how they've kept their passion for teaching
and learning alive. Project organizers will select the best submissions
for a book. "Senior teachers are a valuable, but too often undervalued,
segment of the profession," says Sarah Levine, the project's director.
"I expect this book to have a significant positive impact on the way
senior teachers are viewed." Essays should be no longer than 800 words.
Send them to: A Passion for Teaching, 55 Day School Lane, Belmont, MA
02178. Or fax them to (617) 489-1942.

Disclaimer Barred

A federal court has ruled that Louisiana's Tangipahoa Parish can no
longer require teachers to read students a disclaimer before discussing
evolution. Required since 1994, the disclaimer violates the U.S.
Constitution's prohibition against government establishment of
religion, U.S. District Judge Marcel Livaudais Jr. said in the August
decision. The disclaimer, which teachers were told to read when the
theory of evolution was addressed in class, says in part: "The lesson
to be presented... [is] not intended to influence or dissuade the
biblical version of creation or any other concept." Two parents filed a
lawsuit against the district in 1994 on behalf of their children. The
American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana joined in the suit. The
Tangipahoa school board plans to appeal the decision.

The People's Choice

Although the nation's public schools continue to enjoy strong
support, a growing number of people, especially African Americans,
favor private school vouchers, according to the 29th Phi Delta
Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitude Toward the Public Schools.
Although the poll did not use the term "vouchers," it asked whether
respondents would favor a proposal in which the government paid all or
part of the tuition for students who chose to attend nonpublic schools.
Forty-nine percent of the adults surveyed, up from 43 percent last
year, said they would favor such a plan. "People like the idea of
choice," said Lowell Rose, the poll's director said. Support was
particularly strong among black respondents; 62 percent favored the
plan, compared with 47 percent of whites.

On Strike

Lay teachers in the 22 Roman Catholic high schools run by the
Archdiocese of Philadelphia walked off the job the week after Labor
Day, the only teachers in a big-city system to strike that week. Pay
was the main sticking point. Starting teachers make $24,800, and the
scale tops out at $47,000, compared with $58,434 in the city's public
schools. Church officials say that meeting the teachers' pay demands
would force a tuition hike.

Bravo, Micesto!

Suffolk, Virginia, high school junior David Merrell subjected one
group of mice to four weeks of heavy-metal music, another to Mozart,
and a third to neither. When he ran them through a maze, the control
group averaged five minutes, the Mozart mice one-and-a-half, and the
metal mice 30.

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